TTPrograms

It seems like it requires a particularly narrow world view to equate censorship resistance with vice.

Really it should be something like 1.2*profits/(probability of discovery) so that the expected return on criminal activities is negative.

What's the evidence here? You have no way of knowing if they own the wallet or not. Support seems not bothered:

https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/6gtrmd/free...

I think this is an attempt at inducing a panic.

Why do you want to convert to USD fast? If you're concerned about such short time movements in price it's probably not an asset you want to have a lot of money in...

> 50 years from now, we'll have a global system that coordinates the rotation of antibiotics so we use them in lockstep.

That is really cool idea.

They don't even seem to cite that work: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11051-017-3826-6

Unfalsifiable arguments are not especially strong.

In the example of the dirty bomb, I'm not sure that the number of casualties/cancer incidences is especially high, based on some brief search. Sept 11 seems like it was a more damaging attack, for example, and that seems roughly as difficult to replicate as a dirty bomb. Especially given the trade-off between payload and shielding your substances enough to prevent detection by the myriad of radiation detection systems I'm sure DHS has installed in major cities.

But you are certainly correct that statistically these events are more difficult to interpret, and raw averages are not a fair comparison.

I should say - that's not to say that the technical content isn't very interesting. I just think that the solutions to violence are better considered from the perspective of preventing people from becoming violent people, rather than preventing violence from occurring. I think there's significant evidence to suggest that there are very powerful yet unused paths forward in that direction.

There are other applications that such a system could be interesting for, though. What about determining interest rates on loans for people and small businesses? Small businesses could benefit greatly if lower-rate small loans enabled them to grow. Maybe insurance rates too? Etc.

The number of people killed by terrorism in developed countries per year is, what, a hundredth of those killed in car accidents? A tenth of those shot in Chicago alone?

http://www.businessinsider.com/death-risk-statistics-terrori...

Terrorists have to kill literally hundreds of times more people per year for it to justify even the meagerest response. And one may argue about the economic impacts, but that's just a reflection of this underlying irrationality. If we had media focusing on "Keep Calm and Carry On" like Israel does now or Britain did in WWII it would have a much smaller economic impact - and terrorists would stop doing it, since it would be less effective at achieving the subgoal of "terror".

So this post is really begging the question IMO.

It's just not a fair comparison. No reason to get in a tiff.

Pop science, business books, political books, that sort of thing - proper graduate-level math and science textbooks definitely have plenty of content. Sometimes those can even be on the opposite side of the spectrum, where the focus is too much on the equations and not enough on the conceptual.

This may be an unusual opinion, but I read a lot, and I've found non-fiction books to just not be efficient means of educating myself anymore. Most topics can be illustrated and described in far fewer words than a book takes. I get about a third of the way through a lot of books and say "ok I get it", as the author basically just continues to say the same thing in different ways. I'm sure this is incentivized by current publishing structure.

Not only that, but figures and plots provide far more information density than words, and books don't frequently include them in large quantity. I've found scientific literature and a number of very high quality bloggers to be a much more efficient source of reading material.

That's not to say this is always true - biographies in particular seem to have the most consistently large content / page count.

FYI, foot wounds are very susceptible to infection. So yes your kids may have better arches, but if they get a severe infection from a splinter in the deck that's probably going to offset those benefits.

The "rounding" he's describing is the "beating" you're describing. If the game you play is just long term sums of values then expected value is all you need, and in your example they're all even.

How many winners do you intend to select?

This model of Apple/Microsoft comparison is approximately 5-10 years out of date. MacOs has become a sweeter malware target, and Windows has hardened up since XP. Similarly, OS stability is not clearly dominated by one or the other in their latest offerings.

How well does Dub work? That could be another issue preventing widespread adoption.

It's one thing to say "this has value for some people" and another to say "you're legally obligated to do it this way (costing $x more)".

Thanks to the 23andMe test I found out have I think 6 of 8 rare bad variants of various genes that give me what's currently estimated at around a cumulative 50% chance to develop a particular type of leukemia late in life. Of course, 23andMe doesn't provide this information - I came across it accidentally while studying my SNPs with other third party tools.

I don't really think about it that much - experimental treatments for it are already basically curing the disease and if I do get it it probably won't be for another 20 or 30 years. But now I can be the tiniest bit proactive - getting my CBC checked every few years, and watching out for unusual symptoms like fatigue.

The challenge is in communicating these things properly with fair analyses of the probability - we have X model that predicts Y risk, and we have Z error bounds on that. While it's unfortunate that most people lack the education to interpret statistical statements like that, I don't see why that should legally preclude me from getting information relevant to my health without a gatekeeper geneticist to hold my hand through "this variant has 1% prevalence, that means that 1 in a hundred people have it...".

Wait, you can still get viruses from opening word documents? What is this, 1998?

Good to know that Microsoft is focusing on the important things.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot)

I don't really see how it's a problem that it's "leaking" a tuple API - it's not like there's private methods in Python. Everything can see everything. If anything having the state of an object available explicitly as a tuple seems like a good idea to me, as opposed to trying to figure out what's a stateful variable and what's a method etc.

Hello Mr. straw man.

I've had friends get killed by grocery store alcohol. It's very far from benign.

See how productive this is?

For people asking about the amount of energy we're talking about, the energy density of a magnetic field is |B|^2 /(2mu_0). It appears that the described structure has something on the order of the cross section of Mars, and I'll assume that it's depth is in that ballpark as well. For a fictitious uniform field that would require on the order of 1.6e19 J, which is roughly 1.2 times the total electrical energy output of the US in 2001:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=4%2F3+pi+*+(radius+of+m...

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1.617%C3%9710%5E19+joul...

Assuming you had no losses, so say ideal superconducting coils, that's how much energy you have to dump into magnetic field. You can do this as slow as you like, so with 1/10 the US electrical energy production it would take 10 years to build up that magnetic field. Hypothetically, if you had thin-film plastic PV cells (like cellophane thin to be reasonable to build and get into space) with 100% efficiency covering the footprint of this system (Mars) you could generate enough power to charge up this field in 471 seconds:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1e19+J+%2F+((solar+powe...)

Of course the big story here is that efficient thin film solar in space could generate obscene amounts of power.

I'm not sure on the depth of the field volume required, so that might make it easier, too.

Also, you should reach out to DJTechTools: http://djtechtools.com/

This is pretty cool. Back when I was DJing I would have definitely bought this (and may yet, if I put my setup together again).

I'd suggest showing this working with Traktor or Serato - Ableton can functionally do something like this already (with Max/MSP) in which case you're competing on UI. This sort of thing is basically impossible in Traktor, last I checked, so you're bringing a much bigger improvement to those users. The live DJ market also benefits much more from improvements to their MIDI controls. If you make a demo video like Ean Golden does with the Midi Fighter [1] or NI does with Traktor [2] I think you'd see significant interest.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13AHLkIziNY

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEP4wF1hgrM

On the other hand, there are services that provide captioning at extremely low costs. The university could write a relatively small check to comply.

ADA imposes much more expensive mandates to much smaller businesses, and I'm under the impression that most people consider that to be acceptable.

I think a few people have open-sourced various audio fingerprinting algorithms. Perhaps we should standardize around one and enable real UUID for audio files? That seems to be the missing piece for a lot of the novel functionality you're looking to hit. Otherwise you're stuck doing fuzzy pattern matching on metadata, which seems tricky especially considering possible variation in live recording etc.

Side point, but am I to understand from this that there is an email list "cs.opinion" which is "no-holds barred and often both agressive and personal"? That seems like a terrible idea in a professional environment.